Secondary Impacts of COVID-19 on Local Communities

Andrew J. Greenlee
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ruby Mendenhall
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Andrew J. Greenlee University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Translating Knowledge into Action – The Effect of Eviction Moratoria on the Transmission of SARS-CoV-2

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many areas of life. Impacts on housing markets have been particularly profound, especially for households already facing housing instability challenges. A patchwork of federal, state, and local eviction moratoria have been an important public health intervention. In this presentation, I describe an effort to model the effect of evictions on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 epidemics, with the goal of understanding how the virus transmits within and between households in a theoretical metropolitan area. In addition to exploring some of the results of this model which underscore the importance of eviction moratoria as a public health intervention, I reflect upon some of the challenges of informing local and national advocacy and policy debates with these findings, and point to the ways in which geospatial software and a CyberGIS approach may aid in translating basic science knowledge into evidence for policy and advocacy.

Andrew J. Greenlee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Greenlee’s research lies at the intersection of housing policy, poverty, and social equity within cities and regions. His current research examines neighborhood and metropolitan opportunity structures through residential mobility processes. Greenlee’s other ongoing research examines the influence of governance on spatial outcomes for public and subsidized housing participants, and the dynamics of neighborhood change driven by urban renewal processes and public housing transformation.

Ruby Mendenhall University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lessons (Not) Learned: Chicago Death Inequities during the 1918 Flu and COVID-19 Ruby Mendenhall University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

To show how 400+ years of racial trauma (since 1619) affect African Americans, we compare excess Black death rates in Chicago during the 1918 Influenza with COVID-19 death rates. We argue that former slaves and descendent of slaves migrated to Chicago during two Great Migrations and encountered the color line in the form of segregated housing, employment discrimination and lack of access to healthcare (Mendenhall 2010). We examine death rates from two pandemics over 100 years apart for lessons learned and not learned regarding race, space and inequality. Later, we will also examine variables associated with COVID-19 deaths in Black segregated communities.

Ruby Mendenhall is an Associate Professor of Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, Gender and Women’s Studies and Social Work. She is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; Women and Gender in Global Perspectives; the Cline Center for Advance Social Research; Epstein Health Law and Policy Program; Family Law and Policy Program and the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Mendenhall is the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Democratization of Health Innovation at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Mendenhall’s research examines how living in racially segregated neighborhoods with high levels of violence affects Black mothers’ mental and physical health using surveys, interviews, crime statistics, police records, data from 911 calls, art, wearable sensors and genomic analysis. She employs big data to recover Black women’s lost history using topic modeling and data visualization to examine over 800,000 documents from 1740 to 2014.